Toxic legacy: Examining the old Parker Street dump
By BECKY W. EVANS
NEW BEDFORD — A Standard-Times photograph snapped at a groundbreaking ceremony for New Bedford High School on Jan. 17, 1970, captures the excitement surrounding the building of one of the state’s largest and most modern high schools at that time.
Pictured in the photo are then Superintendent James R. Hayden, architect Owen F. Hackett, Jr. and then Mayor George Rogers. The men, dressed in overcoats, suits and hard hats, grin as they shovel dirt at the site, the former home of the city-owned Parker Street dump. The crowd of onlookers includes members of the School Committee at the time, among them: Vincent J. Worden, John M. Xifaras, Rose Ferreira and Albert A. Boucher.
The festive group did not know the property contained industrial ash loaded with excessive levels of PCBs and other toxic chemicals, which local manufacturing companies dumped at the site between the 1930s and the 1970s.
“Nobody had heard of PCBs in 1970,” said Rogers, who noted that he took office in 1970, two years after city and school officials chose the former dump as the site for the new high school.
“We knew it was a dump, but then most schools all over the country were built on either dumps or cemeteries,” Rogers said. “That’s the only place where cities have free land.”
Eleven months after the groundbreaking photo was taken, the Environmental Protection Agency opened for business in the nation’s capital. Nine years after that, the EPA banned the manufacture of potentially cancer-causing PCBs.
key discovery in 2000
In 1994, the Andrea McCoy Memorial Athletic Field was constructed on city-owned land opposite New Bedford High School. The land, which has been part of the Parker Street dump, was allegedly filled with dump ash during construction of the high school in 1970. To make the soccer field, the city graded and covered the site with clean soil, according to a 2006 draft report by TRC, the city’s environmental contractor.
PCB contamination from the former dump was first detected at McCoy Field in 2000. Soil sampling identified PCBs in fill material found in a wooded area near a field where students played soccer and lacrosse. The area was fenced off and the field was deemed safe.
Further testing of the 6-acre athletic complex, prompted by school officials who were considering building the new Keith Middle School there, revealed significant concentrations of PCBs, lead and other hazardous chemicals. Consulting engineer Alan D. Hanscom advised the School Committee that it was possible to build a safe, affordable middle school on the property by excavating the contaminated dump material and capping the site.
The School Committee took his advice and decided on Feb. 11, 2001, to build the new middle school at McCoy Field.
But in 2004, after construction had begun, more extensive soil sampling showed much higher concentrations of PCBs, which triggered involvement by the EPA. The same year, soil testing at New Bedford High School identified PCBs at levels exceeding state standards.
In 2005, the EPA granted conditional approval for the City of New Bedford to continue with construction of the new Keith Middle School. The approval, as described in an Aug. 31, 2005 letter from the EPA, was contingent upon the city assessing potential PCB contamination both inside and outside New Bedford High School and submitting a cleanup plan. In addition, the city was required to investigate potential PCB contamination, and clean up what was found, on “nearby private properties, at the existing Keith Middle School, and at the associated school athletic fields.”
When he took office in January 2006, Mayor Scott W. Lang inherited the Keith project from former Mayor Frederick M. Kalisz, Jr. The new Allen P. Keith Middle School opened to students on Dec. 12, 2006.
“We came into this office with a situation that was well established and what we have been trying to do is work with the EPA and DEP (Department of Environmental Protection) to make sure it is clean for the kids,” Lang told The Standard-Times during a recent interview.
He described EPA approval for Keith construction and the surrounding cleanup as “very unique.”
“The EPA went across the street to the high school, which was built before their existence,” he said. “They said, ‘We want kids to go to a clean middle school and, by the way, if they are going across the street afterwards, we want to make sure the high school is clean, too.’”
massive cleanup continues
Nearly 40 years after the groundbreaking ceremony for New Bedford High School, the City of New Bedford is engaged in a massive cleanup of PCB contamination at the former Parker Street dump.
Cleanup activities, estimated to cost $103 million (including the $70 million cost of Keith Middle School), are focused inside a 140-acre footprint known as the Parker Street Waste Site. The area includes New Bedford High School, the new Keith Middle School, athletic fields, residential properties, private businesses, a state-owned skating rink and a church.
Thousands of soil samples from the former dump show a laundry list of toxic chemicals: polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), volatile organic compounds, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and heavy metals, including arsenic, barium, cadmium, chromium, lead and mercury.
Lang said he is optimistic that the full cleanup will be done “within the next couple of years.”
“It’s been a three-and-a-half-year project that we’ve been working on literally every day,” he said, noting that the city has developed a strong working partnership with the EPA and the state Department of Environmental Protection.
Site remediation is complete at Keith Middle School and nearly complete at Walsh Field, the mayor said. In terms of testing for and remediating PCB-contaminated building materials inside New Bedford High School, the city is “way ahead of most schools in the country,” he said.
“The next place we’re going to hit is the area around the high school,” he said. “At the same time we will continue to work inside the high school.”
The city will also be “making decisions” related to PCB contamination in wetlands behind Keith Middle School, he said.
more soil testing
The one thing that could extend the cleanup timeline is the results of additional soil testing, Lang said.
The EPA is spearheading an effort to perform soil sampling in new areas after neighborhood residents raised concerns that dump contamination may extend beyond the existing boundaries of the Parker Street Waste Site. Residents and members of the local advocacy group Citizens Leading Environmental Action Network, or CLEAN, want soil testing at private residential properties and public housing projects.
“It is important that these additional areas be tested because of the imminent health risks to those living and working in these areas,” said CLEAN president Eddie L. Johnson.
EPA spokesman David Deegan said the agency will host a public meeting sometime in the next four to six weeks to discuss plans for future sampling.
“We are developing a sampling plan and making concrete steps forward to address community concerns,” he said.
A draft EPA document obtained by The Standard-Times lists 11 potential sampling areas, including: some private residential properties on Maxfield, Florence and Hunter streets; a multi-unit private residence at the corner of Hunter and Parker streets and the Carabiner’s Indoor Climbing gym; New Bedford Housing Authority’s Parkdale complex; some private residential properties on Greenwood, Ruggles and Summit streets and Hathaway Boulevard; the former Bethel A.M.E church property; a right-of-way on Summit Street; private residential properties and city-owned properties on Durfee Street; a wetland area between Durfee and Potter streets; the state-owned Hetland Memorial Skating Rink; the eastern site footprint boundary along Walsh Field; and the New Bedford Housing Authority’s Westlawn complex.
The Rev. Curtis Dias, an environmental justice advocate, said he would like to see additional soil sampling around the foundation of Keith Middle School and underneath New Bedford High School.
“This is urgent for the public health of students and children,” he said.
enrollment mushroomed
During the late 1950s, New Bedford school officials warned that increased enrollment, partly due to an influx of immigrants, was leading to overcrowding at the old high school on County Street.
The School Committee spent much of the next decade weighing options for expanding the high school, among them: building an addition to the County Street school, remodeling the junior high school for use as a high school, constructing a second high school in the city’s north end, or building a single new high school on 40 acres of vacant land, known as the former Parker Street dump.
For decades, the west end property had served as part of a city-owned dumping ground for incinerated industrial waste, household ash and garbage, abandoned cars and other junk. People who lived in the Parker Street neighborhood during the 1940s and 1950s described the site in recent interviews as a sprawling dump filled with rats, rusty refrigerators and burning debris.
Dumping operations ceased during the early 1960s and the site was eyed as a potential location for the new high school.
Newspaper accounts of School Committee and City Council meetings during the 1960s show little concern for the dump’s impact on public health and the environment.
“Environmental concerns were not apparent at that time,” said architect Owen F. Hackett, Jr., who was hired by the city to design the high school.
Hackett said he and others were initially “very concerned” about constructing a 500,000-square-foot building on a former refuse dump, but only for structural reasons. The “peat and junk fill” at the site meant the land was too soft to support such a large structure, he said.
lobbying for site
Both the New Bedford League of Women Voters and the Exchange Club of New Bedford lobbied the School Committee in support of constructing a new high school at the Parker Street site.
Committee members twice rejected the Parker Street proposal in 1965, mainly due to the estimated $18 million price tag. However, a year later on May 20, 1966, the committee reversed its stance and voted 4-2 to build a new high school at the former dump.
Voting in favor of the site were members Dr. Paul F. Walsh, Dr. John T. Barrows, Rose Ferreira and Attorney Paul J. McCawley.
James W. Whitehead and Donat F. Fortin, who supported building a second high school in the North End, voted against the project. Mayor Edward F. Harrington, who missed the meeting, wrote a letter to the committee saying he favored expanding the current high school facilities on County Street, according to a Standard-Times article from May 21, 1966.
Five months after the School Committee vote, the City Council approved the Parker Street high school proposal. The State School Building Assistance Commission, which ultimately provided $9.2 million in funding for the $18 million high school, also approved the school’s location in 1966.
It took two more years to make the decision final.
The 40-acre site, which had once been owned by the city, was now privately owned by several entities.
The City Council intended to take back the land by eminent domain, but the move was delayed by a rezoning controversy related to the proposed construction of apartments on 21 acres of the property. School Committee members insisted that the new high school would require the entire 40-acre site and could not be built in addition to the apartments.
On June 10, 1968, the City Council voted final approval for an order taking all 40 acres of the former Parker Street dump. The vote killed the residential housing proposal and paved the way for a new 4,000-student high school.
site preparation
Perini Corp. of Framingham won the bid to build the new high school. Rogers said one of his first tasks as mayor was to sign Perini’s contract.
“All the work was done by the Harrington administration,” he said. “The only thing left was to sign the contract.”
But before construction could begin, special site-preparation work was necessary.
“Soil engineers say the material there isn’t suitable for roads and parking areas, nor for a building,” according to a Standard-Times article from Feb. 27, 1969. “However, the problem can be overcome, the engineers said, by removing material from beneath the building site and replacing it with acceptable fill.”
Hackett, the architect, said in a recent interview that it would have proved too expensive for the city to excavate all the “unsatisfactory” dump fill on the 40-acre site.
“They couldn’t afford it,” he said. “It was always budget, budget, budget.”
Instead, the city opted to remove only the fill beneath the school itself.
For the rest of the property, it chose a cheaper alternative. Termed “pre-loading,” the alternative involved using piles of granular material to pack down fill in places that would later become paved parking lots and roadways.
About 65,000 cubic yards of material was dumped in huge piles that compressed the dump fill over a period of four to six months.
Before laying the foundation for the school, workers excavated a 460,000-square-foot area that contained “peat, refuse and other unsatisfactory” fill from the former dump, according to a Standard-Times article from March 19, 1969.
Later, the same granular material from the pre-loading phase was used to fill in the foundation area.
When recently asked where the excavated dump ash was disposed, Hackett had no answer.
“I don’t know. I had no authority with that,” he said.
Rogers also denied knowing where the excavated soil ended up.
“The excavation was all predetermined before I took office,” he said. “Perini made the decision.”
decades of dumping
City manufacturing companies are suspected of dumping incinerated ash containing PCBs, heavy metals and other chemicals at the Parker Street dump between the 1930s and the 1970s, according to Molly Cote of the state Department of Environment Protection. The City of New Bedford recently found PCB-laden electrical capacitors stamped with the Cornell-Dubilier name buried at 102 Greenwood St., across from the high school.
Anecdotal evidence from city-conducted interviews and historical photographs indicate that ash excavated from the high school construction site was dumped across the street on empty land that later became McCoy Field, said David Sullivan of TRC Environmental Corp., a city contractor. Over the years, the ash was used for land grading and filling in wetlands around the neighborhood.
“We hear that the stuff was brought over here in piles,” said Sullivan, while pointing to empty lots off Hathaway Boulevard, pictured in an aerial photograph from 1971.
A Standard-Times photograph from 1970 offers even closer views of the land. Tire tracks show evidence that the ash was pushed around the site.
One lot in particular appears to be covered with a large amount of ash. The lot is the current site of an overgrown lot that the city granted to Bethel AME Church in 1964 for a new church building.
Today, the undeveloped lot may contain some of the highest concentrations of PCBs in the Parker Street Waste Site. The city recently repurchased the property from Bethel AME Church.
death of an activist
Pauline Woolley, mother of the late environmental activist Brian Woolley, told The Standard-Times in an interview before his death that when her son was 10 years old, he would bring water to workers building the new high school. The family lived on Summit Street, just a few blocks from the construction site.
Pauline didn’t learn until years later that Brian sometimes rode in the back of dump trucks that hauled excavated ash from the site to nearby wetlands.
“I remember watching them bringing up this black dirt, and they’d fill up the dump truck and back it into the field where Keith is — it was all swamp until they filled it in,” Brian said during the same interview. “So much damage was done and we weren’t even aware of it.”
When he was 19 years old, Brian was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease, a rare cancer of the lymph tissue. Radiation and chemotherapy cured the cancer but permanently damaged his aorta. During his 40s, he suffered a heart attack related to artery blockage from his cancer treatment.
Then in late 2007, he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. The disease killed him after a two-year-long battle, during which he continued to push for comprehensive cleanup of the Parker Street waste site.
Brian, who was founder and president of the advocacy group Wasted Away, now CLEAN, believed there was a connection between his illnesses and decades of living and playing on contaminated land in the Parker Street neighborhood.
Health Studies
PCBs, which city companies such as AVX Corp. and Cornell-Dubilier used in the manufacturing of electrical devices, are believed to cause cancer and other serious health problems.
In 2006, the Massachusetts Teachers Association assigned Cambridge attorney Sarah Gibson to work with the New Bedford Educators Association. Gibson specializes in working with teachers’ unions on occupational health and safety cases.
Gibson said several teachers reported health problems they believed were associated with PCBs and general air quality inside the New Bedford High School building.
Gibson and the local union urged city officials to conduct PCB blood testing for teachers and neighborhood residents who worried about the health effects of living and working near land contaminated with PCBs, heavy metals and other toxins.
In April 2007, the state Department of Public Health offered to conduct PCB blood testing for teachers at New Bedford High School and Keith Middle School as well as people who lived near the schools.
Blood samples were collected in February and March 2009, but their analysis was delayed last spring due to laboratory activities associated with the H1N1 flu, according to the DPH’s Bureau of Environmental Health.
Reports on PCB blood testing, indoor air quality at New Bedford High School, and cancer rates in the Parker Street neighborhood are due out in spring 2010, according to the agency.
Gibson said she is keeping track of PCB testing and remediation work at the high school, so that she will have information to give doctors if teachers are found to have health problems associated with contamination there.
“I think what makes New Bedford High School and that area different from many of my other cases is that there is contamination on the site … and then there are issues with respect to the building materials themselves having PCBs,” she said. “That is somewhat different from what I normally run into.”
Gibson has worked on cases involving schools with PCB-laden building materials that were built on former dumps, but those dumps did not have PCB contamination.
New Bedford High School “seems to combine the two,” she said.
Grand OPENING
New Bedford High School opened to sophomores, juniors and seniors during the first week of September 1972.
Over the preceding Labor Day weekend, The Standard-Times published a 14-page special section describing the school’s state-of-the-art facilities and revamped curriculum. Local businesses and politicians placed advertisements peppered with congratulatory messages.
Mayor Rogers, in his ad, described the school as “a new adventure in learning.”
The school’s “four houses flow into a central core for specialized learning and corridors lead away from the core area into rooms to develop creative arts and career opportunities and finally into the gymnasium and swimming pool were our youngsters will develop physically,” he wrote.
Former Standard-Times sports editor Don Harrington referred to the school as the “Taj Mahal of secondary education in this end of the state.”
In the special edition, Principal Paul Rodrigues is quoted as saying, “New Bedford High School will challenge any facility in the state.”
Superfund Investigation
In 1980, Congress established the Superfund program to fund the cleanup of toxic waste sites around the country. Six years later, the waste management division of EPA Region 1 initiated a preliminary study to investigate whether New Bedford High School should be listed as a Superfund site.
Under the Superfund law, people with knowledge of hazardous waste disposal sites were required to notify the EPA, said Richard Cavagnero, deputy director of EPA Region 1’s Office of Site Remediation and Restoration.
“There was a blitz of paper that came through the door after the law was passed,” he said. The law was officially called the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, or CERCLA.
The EPA drafted an umbrella list of potential hazardous waste sites, which were entered into a database, known as CERCLIS. The agency then hired contractors to conduct file reviews for each site at state offices.
“EPA really had no involvement in these sites prior to CERCLA,” Cavagnero said. “The state was the only source of information.”
The CERCLIS file for the New Bedford High School site is very thin. There are two reports submitted by NUS Corp., an environmental contractor with offices in Bedford, Mass., and Pittsburgh, Pa.
One report, dated Sept. 9, 1989, states that there are “threats of groundwater contamination and direct contact with any contaminants which may be present at” the New Bedford High School site. The report notes that the company conducted interviews with local officials during a 1985 investigation of the site.
“During those interviews several people reported that the property was originally a swamp and had been historically used as an ash dump,” according to the report. “Also, prior to construction of the high school approximately 8 to 10 feet of material was reportedly excavated and moved to another dump across Hathaway Boulevard and to the New Bedford Municipal Landfill. One person also stated that harbor sediments may have been used as fill during construction of the high school.”
The report concludes that further inspection be set at medium priority due to a lack of information about “the types and quantities of material disposed on the property, the proximity of private wells, and the potential for direct contact with any contaminated soils.”
This is where the paper trail ends for the New Bedford High School site.
Today, the CERCLIS databases contains 945 toxic waste sites in Massachusetts. Of those sites, 32 are on the National Priorities List of Superfund sites, 376 are being evaluated for a potential listing, and 945 are labeled as having “no further response action plan,” Cavagnero said.
He believes New Bedford High School shares this last status.
In the 1980s, the review process for getting a hazardous waste site added to the National Priorities List required proof that there was a direct threat to the drinking water supply, Cavagnero said. Since no drinking water wells were located at the New Bedford High School site, it was seen “as having no groundwater exposure pathway,” he said.
“That pretty much killed it in terms of a potential NPL listing.”
Today, the process for adding sites to the NPL considers additional pathways for exposure to hazardous waste such as through direct contact with contaminated soil, Cavagnero said.
REVISITING SUPERFUND
Mayor Lang insists there is no reason to revisit whether the Parker Street waste site should be placed on the National Priorities List.
“The EPA looks at you and says, “This is not a Superfund site in any way,’” Lang said. “It doesn’t have that kind of toxicity in any manner.”
Cavagnero said the EPA has no plans to take the lead role in overseeing the cleanup of the former dump. That role currently falls to the state Department of Environmental Protection under state cleanup laws, known as Chapter 21E.
“I think we would only do that if we thought there was a need to have federal authority on top of state authority to get done what ultimately needs to get done.”
Listing the former dump as a Superfund site would require a recommendation from Gov. Deval Patrick based on advice from the DEP.
Molly Cote, project manager for DEP’s Southeast regional office, said sites are usually recommended if there is not a viable responsible party to conduct the cleanup work.
“In this case, it’s not one we’d recommend since we have someone doing the work,” she said, referring to the City of New Bedford, which is paying for and orchestrating the $103 million cleanup.
For now, the EPA is focusing its efforts on developing a plan for additional soil sampling in the Parker Street neighborhood.
“We are working with the state, city and community to address what people see as information gaps and I think we are making progress there,” Cavagnero said. “We are going to make an effort to help them get all that information. Where it goes from there, I think the information will tell us if it will stay a 21E site.”
full article
